Corporate · Bengaluru

You shape First Principles, The Ken’s podcast, Sunday newsletters, and the community around them into one product that people discover as a bundle, move through as a bundle, and belong to as a community.

Bengaluru; full time; 2 to 4 years of experience.

Link Copied

About the role

First Principles is The Ken’s other voice. Where the daily stories explain how Indian business works, First Principles is about how the people in it think: a podcast of long conversations with founders and leaders, and a set of Sunday newsletters on mental models, reflection, careers, books, film, photographs, and the rest of a working life. It has its own readers and listeners, many of whom came to The Ken through it and think of themselves as First Principles people first. Today those pieces work, but they work separately. The newsletters, the podcast, the emails around them, and the landing pages were each built on their own, and a reader of one may never find the others. Nobody can yet buy, join, or clearly see First Principles as one thing.

You’ll be the first person whose job is the whole of it. You don’t write the newsletters or host the podcast. You plan, shape, and iterate the universe they live in, and you make it compelling enough that it grows on its own.

The podcast is hosted by The Ken’s CEO, and the newsletters carry his voice. That gives this role unusual access and an unusual requirement: you’ll be shaping a founder’s own product, and you’ll need to tell him what isn’t working.

What you will do

Define the bundle. Decide what First Principles is: its pieces, how they relate, who it’s for, what a new reader gets first and next. Write it on a page anyone can repeat, and keep revising it. Build the front door. Own the product surfaces: one home instead of several landing pages, one sign-up,



the welcome and onboarding journey, the emails that connect a newsletter reader to the podcast and a listener to the newsletters. Ship them with product and design.

Shape the pipeline. You don’t write the Sunday newsletters, but you help plan and imagine them: the slate a quarter out, the recurring themes, which podcast conversations feed which editions, where surveys and quests go. Run the First Principles editorial calendar as a whole so the pieces reinforce each other.

Grow the community. First Principles people answer surveys, take on quests, write back, and turn up. Build the ways they do that: prompts in each edition, recurring participation formats, recognition that makes contributing worth it, moments where they meet.

Measure the bundle, not the parts. How many people use one First Principles product, how many two or more, how they move between them, which door they came through, how many become The Ken’s subscribers, what the community does each week. Report monthly in the open review. Where this can’t be measured today, define what it should count and get it built.

Say what isn’t working. Including to the host. A conversation that didn’t land, a theme gone stale, a page nobody uses: name it, with the number, and propose what to do instead.

What we are looking for

2 to 4 years running, growing, or producing a newsletter, a podcast, a creator’s media business, a membership,



or a content product with a community around it. We care more about what you’ve built and what it did than where. You will do well here if:

– You’ve grown an audience for something you didn’t personally write or host, and you can show the numbers.

– You think in systems: slates, calendars, journeys, formats that repeat.

– You can edit without writing. You see what an edition is trying to do, what it’s missing, and what it should sit next to, and you can say so to the person who wrote it.

– You understand community as participation, not audience. You’d rather have 300 people who answer than 10,000 who open.

– You read numbers daily and change things because of them.

– You can hold your own with a founder about his own work: respectful, specific, not easily talked out of a number.

– You like the subject. Mental models, how people decide, how careers actually go, what a founder learned the hard way: you read this anyway.

– You use AI tools for the grunt work and still form your own view.

– Useful but not required: you’ve packaged sponsorship or worked beside someone who sold it; run surveys, quests, or challenges for a community; you already read or listen to First Principles.

What you get

A product with its own audience and identity, inside a company that has spent 10 years earning trust, with the founder who built it as your most demanding user. You join at the moment it goes from a set of good things to one thing, so its shape carries your decisions. A community that already behaves like one. Real resources: a podcast team, newsletter writers, product and design, and people who sell sponsorship. Your job connects them. Have questions?

Mail us at [email protected] with the name of the position in the subject line.

📌 First Principles Lead (Bengaluru)
🏢 The Ken
📍 Bengaluru